Electronic documents may contain a mixture of facts and opinions. At times, a reader may only be interested in facts, or may wish to have the facts be identified. For example, a user performing an on-line search for information may wish to obtain facts about a particular subject as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, presenting a list of web pages or other electronic documents that are related to the search terms used require the user to individually examine each web page or other electronic document and distinguish the facts from the opinions or subjective information.
Attempts have been made to perform fact extraction. However, accurate fact extraction can be a slow and inefficient process even for high-speed server computers. Such fact extraction attempts generally apply a linguistic analysis to the entire contents of the electronic document to extract those facts that it may contain. When applying fact extraction to hundreds or thousands of electronic documents, the amount of time needed to achieve a result may be unacceptable.